Why not sue Google, ya pansies!
The RIAA lawsuit against 4 college students barely registered on my radar. Ho hum, a bunch of college kids caught sharing an egregious number of MP3’s, I thought.
On closer examination, the “crime” of which these fellows stand accused is … the creation of a search engine. What each of them did was create software which indexed the files available as Windows (SMB) FileShares on their campus networks, and thereby provide a searchable web interface for tracking down that Linux ISO image or a term paper on the French Revolution.
In other words, they were doing what Google does, but for SMB FileShares on a LAN, rather than for for the whole WWW. Even without their search engines, a Windows XP user could still search the University LAN for SMB shared files, just a lot less efficiently.
Since the DMCA has a specific exemption for search engines, you gotta wonder what the RIAA hopes to achieve. (Reading this critique of the complaint against one of the students, Daniel Peng of Princeton, leaves little doubt in this layman’s minds as to how the case should be decided.)
The obvious answer is that they are engaged in pure intimidation. Go after some poor, scared-s***less students and win, lose or (most likely) settle, you strike fear in the hearts of their filesharing classmates. After all, if this is what happens to the author of a search engine, imagine what might happen to someone engaged in actual copyright-infringement.
Oh, and if you want to track down some Britney Spears MP3’s, why don’t you try here.
Posted by distler at April 12, 2003 12:22 AM
Better search
Instead of
britney mp3
which includes a lot of results without actual downloadable mp3s, try this search:
britney mp3 “index of” “last modified”